Former Memphis mayor denied charters on home turf

May 3, 2012 — Former Memphis mayor Willie Herenton jokes with reporters before an appeal hearing for charter schools at Shelby County Schools offices. Herenton is Chief Executive Officer of W.E.B. DuBois Consortium which was denied charter school status. (Brandon Dill/Special to The Commercial Appeal)

Former Memphis mayor Willie Herenton said a sellout crowd of families turned out this week at Parkway Gardens Presbyterian Church for an orientation for three W.E.B. Du Bois charter schools he plans to open in Hillcrest High this fall.

But Herenton also must deal with two rounds of rejections from Metro Nashville and Shelby County Schools boards of education for a series of schools he planned to open in 2014.

"There's always a beginning, and launching that beginning is critically important. We are focused on launching high-quality charter schools in Memphis," Herenton said. "The national network will follow."

Herenton envisioned Nashville would be the launch pad for his national brand of charters designed to help urban students overcome poverty, low expectations and absent role models. He got a good indication it wasn't going to work last week when a study committee recommended the school board reject his application for a unique charter serving only adolescents in Juvenile Court.

On Tuesday, Nashville rejected, and so did the unified school board, but for different reasons.

Nashville officials didn't see a need for a charter for delinquent youth. Shelby County was forced to deny because Herenton applied to replicate charters in Memphis that have not opened.

That requires proof of success, including annual reports, three years of audited financial data and detailed reports, for instance, of how he improved a low-performing charter.

"If replication requires previous implementation, that was probably not our interpretation or we didn't read it," Herenton said. "Had we known that, quite frankly, we would not have applied. We missed that in our looking at the information."

Last fall, the State Department of Education rewrote the application for organizations that want to replicate an existing charter, said Rich Haglund, state director of charter schools.

"We notified people and did training sessions," he said. "Essentially, if you have an operating program and you want to make another one of those schools, tell us what is different; tell us about how the network of schools it going to work together."

The committee in Nashville criticized Herenton last week for filing a sloppy application, noting that his application said food service would be provided by Shelby County unified school district.

The committee also noted that Herenton presented no evidence that he had Nashville-based support partners.

"We acknowledge that we had not built a support base in Nashville because we were not assured that Nashville would be receptive to our charter school proposal," Herenton said. "We didn't want to engage in all that work if it was not legitimate."

Herenton announced plans Tuesday night to take over two floors of Hillcrest in a lease agreement the school board will take up in late July. The site is important because it will house three of Herenton's nine startup charter schools. The others will be located at Northside High, Southside Middle and in a prefab building being built by Love Fellowship Ministries, 4475 S. Germantown Road.

Herenton projects each will 200 students. He's on target in Whitehaven and at Love Fellowship but behind on the other two.